


Stuck in the middle with you

by Saetha



Series: O Swallow, have mercy on them [Febuwhump 2021 Prompt Fills] [4]
Category: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Injury, But Not Much, Death, FebuWhump2021, Graphic Injury, Graphic Torture, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Impaling, M/M, Talion whump, Torture, Whump, does it count as major character death if he just keeps coming back?, in here because it sort of applies?, no beta we die like Talion OVER AND OVER AGAIN, or well there is SOME, still gonna plop that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:27:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29197578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saetha/pseuds/Saetha
Summary: Talion finds himself straining against his captors again, one last time, panic bubbling up inside his chest. He might no longer be human, might have endured more agony than many of his mortal siblings combined, but even he has his limits.Help me, Celebrimbor,he thinks.Don’t let me die like this.He thinks he can feel the ghost of a touch on his arm, a breath on his cheek, but when he opens his eyes, the wraith is nowhere to be seen.“There are limits even to my powers.” Celembrimbor’s voice is pensive in his mind, far softer than usual. “I’m sorry.”*Talion gets caught, tortured, and executed. Celebrimbor tries to take at least some of the pain away so that he doesn’t have to spend his last moments alone and in agony.
Relationships: Celebrimbor | Telperinquar & Talion (Shadow of Mordor), Celebrimbor | Telperinquar/Talion (Shadow of Mordor)
Series: O Swallow, have mercy on them [Febuwhump 2021 Prompt Fills] [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2138178
Comments: 15
Kudos: 28
Collections: febuwhump 2021





	Stuck in the middle with you

**Author's Note:**

> Does anyone even still read Shadow of Mordor fic? xD 
> 
> Thinking about Talion always honestly breaks my heart. Decades upon decades of nothing but pain and death and then waking up to do it all over again, like an endlessly grinding machine. I genuinely have no idea how he kept going. Celebrimbor, just go give him a hug? Please? (We are still all consecutively denying what happened towards the end of Shadow of War, yes? Despite the one factoid that the necromancer outfit was hot as hell)
> 
> Heed the tags, btw. This is on the nastier side (one the edge between an M and an E rating imo, so I went with E in the end). Today's prompt was: Impaling.

Sometimes, Talion thinks, he can almost see the person Celebrimbor once was. Not the vengeful wraith, mind set to one purpose and one purpose alone – to take his revenge on Sauron, wreak havoc on his armies, and reshape Mordor to his liking. Not the ghost that lives inside his skin that barely cares how often he dies. Not the white spectre who haunts both his dreams and his nightmares – but the elf he once used to be, filled with kindness as well as determination and a fierce fondness for both his craft and those around him.

He coughs weakly, head still swimming from the blow he received earlier, struggles in vain at the hands that are holding him, to no avail. Talion knows he is going to die; it is not the first, or the tenth, or even the fiftieth time it happens. Although this one will certainly rank high on the list of painful ones, if the grisly spectacle in front of him is any indication. If he could, he would throw himself onto the swords of one of the uruks standing next to him.

“Ranger!” The orc in front of him raises his mace, doesn’t really want a response from him. He is small and scraggly, but there is a manic light in his eyes that belies the apparent weakness in his arms. This is one of those who became captain simply because everyone else was too afraid to go against him, and because he rewards his followers richly. Respect gained through terror and cruelty, rather than pure strength alone.

“I am so glad you have decided to join us for this night’s entertainment!” He waits for the assembled crowd around him to break out in hoots and laughs. “Truly, what a rare occurrence to have the Gravewalker himself amongst us. The _centrepiece_ for tonight, one might say.”

Talion finds himself straining against his captors again, one last time, panic bubbling up inside his chest. He might no longer be human, might have endured more agony than many of his mortal siblings combined, but even he has his limits. _Help me, Celebrimbor_ , he thinks. _Don’t let me die like this_.

He thinks he can feel the ghost of a touch on his arm, a breath on his cheek, but when he opens his eyes, the wraith is nowhere to be seen.

“ _There are limits even to my powers_.” Celembrimbor’s voice is pensive in his mind, far softer than usual. “ _I’m sorry_.”

Talion has no space in his mind left to reply. All he can do is scream as the captain’s mace crashes down on one of his arms, leaving a mangled mass of flesh and bone behind.

“How prettily he screams!” The captain and his followers roar with laughter. Talion hopes, against better knowledge, that the next swing, wherever it hits, will at least render him unconscious. It doesn’t; the captain is far too well-versed in the art of inflicting pain to allow him any such respite. His shoulder is crushed next, then his other arm and Talion screams, screams until he thinks his throat must burst into fire. It is all well and good to try and cling to dignity in the face of torture, but no one will profit from his honour here. So he just howls in agony and sobs, although he does not beg for his life.

The captain finally stops, although Talion doesn’t immediately notice, a red haze in front of his eyes as he tries to process the pain and finds that he cannot. The ground beneath him is muddy, and it takes a moment for him to notice that it is slick with his own blood. Nobody is holding him anymore; nobody needs to. There is nowhere he could crawl out of his own volition that would end it quickly.

Someone jerks up his chin, forces him to swallow a foul-tasting mixture, most likely grog, mixed with something that he doesn’t even want to know about. It does what it’s supposed to, brings him back from the brink of unconsciousness that he has so desperately been longing to slip into.

“No,” he whispers. For a moment he thinks he can feel the ghost of Celebrimbor’s touch on his lips, a drop of blessed coolness against the inferno raging through his body.

“What’s that, Ranger? Tired already?” The captain in front of him leers, punctuates his question with another kick into Talion’s already broken ribs. Talion coughs, feels blood run down his chin, but doesn’t answer. There’s no point. Nothing he says could make a difference to the cruel end that so obviously awaits him this time.

“That’s too bad! We’re just getting started!” The captain laughs and for a moment, Talion gives in to the urge to simply close his eyes, to pretend this isn’t happening. _Not much longer_ , he tells himself. _Not much longer. You will suffer, you will die, and then you will wake up and it will feel like yet another bad nightmare in an ocean of thousands_. Then the orcs begin dragging him somewhere, and all thought is drowned out by his body exploding in pain.

He thinks he can hear the jagged ends of his broken bones grind against each other when they lift him up. The stake they have chosen isn’t properly sharpened, of course it isn’t. Talion has seen this kind of execution before, knows how long it takes to die as the body is dragged downwards along the stake by its own weight rather than pushed. If he had any breath inside him he would have begged, but he doesn’t.

Instead, he just screams again.

He screams until he begins choking on his blood, sees it running down the stake that he is impaled on. It looks black in the light of Mordor’s eternal fires. _There can’t be much of it left inside_ , he thinks. _Please, please let me die_. 

“ _Talion. Close your eyes_.” For a moment, he isn’t even sure who’s talking. Celebrimbor’s voice is softer than he has ever heard it before. Talion gasps, but he does as he is told. The darkness in front of his eyes only seems to amplify the pain, the only distraction he had from the agony vanished. He screams again although it is barely more than a croak that tumbles from his destroyed throat. He-

There is the touch of something soft, something cold on his cheeks, pushing the pain back just a little, enough to make it bearable.

“ _I cannot take it away from you_.” Celebrimbor’s voice again, kind and regretful. “ _But I can give your mind something else to anchor itself to, a touch that goes beyond agony, beyond dying. Just concentrate on my hands_.”

The touch of his fingers becomes stronger, travels from his cheeks over his eyelids down his nose. It traces over his lips as light as a feather, soothes the sting of the cut on his chin, the ache of a broken nose. It is the touch of a friend, of a lover, of someone who cares and Talion would weep if the heat of this place hadn’t long burned every tear away. He wants to speak but all that comes out is a broken moan and more blood. His body is still fighting against the inevitable and Talion wishes that once, just once, he could simply will his own death to be.

“ _Shhh, don’t speak_.” There is the ghost of cold breath over his ear, as if Celebrimbor is kneeling next to him, someone to see him, someone he shares this torment with. Someone who _knows_. Celembrimbor’s touch continues, carding through his scalp, pressing on his shoulders, his chest, numbing the ache of broken bones, torn tendons and punctured organs.

Talion cannot tell how long it takes him to breathe his last. Death does not come quickly for him this time, stretching each moment into eternity. His sight finally begins to darken at the edges and still, Celebrimbor is there, soothing him with a low voice and soft words, like one would a frightened child.

“ _You are not alone_ ,” is the last thing Talion hears before death finally claims him and oh, how he wishes it would be true.

*

He awakens on top of one of their towers. Returning from death is always unpleasant, like being ripped apart and shoved back together again by a vengeful Valar, the phantom pains of this last, most brutal of deaths still lingering in his flesh even when his mortal form has reassembled again. Talion leaves his eyes closed, brings up a hand to his belly, shuddering as he remembers the stake passing through him inch by agonising inch. The memory makes him tremble, and he cannot help a soft groan escaping his throat.

“It took longer for you to return, this time.”

Talion forces his eyes to open to see Celebrimbor kneeling next to him. The wraith’s face is impassive and for a moment Talion wonders whether he imagined the softness of Celebrimbor’s touch, of his words, as he remained by his side throughout a long night of dying.

“Perhaps I am simply tired of experiencing death over and over,” he snaps. It isn’t just his body that is still raw from the extended agony – his soul, too, feels as if it has been flayed open, fraying at the edges as if set aflame. Celebrimbor stares at him then, a curious expression on his face.

“Sacrifices must be made,” he says, but there is a pensive undertone in his voice.

“I know.” Talion clenches his teeth. “But consider, for a moment, who the one is who gets murdered over and over again, whose body is being broken, mutilated, taken apart on a regular basis.”

“Do you doubt in our mission?” The words are the wraith’s, but the tone is still soft, belonging to the elf that Celebrimbor might have been once, rather than the vengeful shadow of himself that he is now.

“No,” Talion says. _Yes_ , he thinks. He isn’t blind. He knows what the ring they made is doing to Celebrimbor, has seen and felt it every day since he put it on. He cannot help the thought that they are hurtling towards an abyss together, but what other way is there to go? What other way is there to keep Gondor safe, to stymy Sauron’s influence?

“Good.” Still, Celebrimbor doesn’t move from his spot, caught in a bizarre cross between the elf-who-was and the wraith-who-is.

“Celebrimbor.” Talion reaches out to him then, forgetting, for a moment, that he cannot truly touch the wraith, not even up here at one of the centres of their power. His fingers pass through Celebrimbor’s hand, slowly as if dragged upstream through a cold river, but passing through all the same.

“Thank you. For- for what you did.” Even now he cannot bring himself to speak of it in detail, put words to the phantom wounds his belly and soul.

“Nobody should be forced to face death alone,” Celebrimbor tells him. “Especially not you. Especially not a death like this. It seemed only right.”

“Thank you,” Talion says again. He tries to will himself to move, to pick up his weapons once more and continue on their never ending quest, but all he can feel is weariness. He looks over at Celebrimbor, the burning white where his eyes once were. “Will you sit here with me? Just for a while.”

Celebrimbor hesitates and Talion can almost feel the wraith clamouring inside him, shouting that there is no time for rest, that they must be off to continue what they started, that there is nothing more important than their mission. The elf visibly pulls himself together, tilts his head a little before he folds his legs underneath his body and sits down.

Talion leans his head back and closes his eyes. He almost doesn’t hear Celebrimbor’s answer.

“Yes.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Merciless](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29245203) by [BlueNeutrino](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueNeutrino/pseuds/BlueNeutrino)




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